Related papers: Billiards with Bombs
Recent experiments have shown that many species of microorganisms leave a solid surface at a fixed angle determined by steric interactions and near-field hydrodynamics. This angle is completely independent of the incoming angle. For several…
We consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
Recently it was proved that every billiard trajectory inside a $C^3$ convex cone has a finite number of reflections. Here, by a $C^3$ convex cone, we mean a cone whose section with some hyperplane is a strictly convex closed $C^3$…
Mushroom billiards have the remarkable property to show one or more clear cut integrable islands in one or several chaotic seas, without any fractal boundaries. The islands correspond to orbits confined to the hats of the mushrooms, which…
We generalize the following simple geometric fact: the only centrally symmetric convex curve of constant width is a circle. Billiard interpretation of the condition of constant width reads: a planar curve has constant width, if and only if,…
We consider classical billiards on surfaces of constant curvature, where the charged billiard ball is exposed to a homogeneous, stationary magnetic field perpendicular to the surface. We establish sufficient conditions for hyperbolicity of…
We study the stability of periodic trajectories of planar inverse magnetic billiards, a dynamical system whose trajectories are straight lines inside a connected planar domain $\Omega$ and circular arcs outside $\Omega$. Explicit examples…
Any periodic trajectory on an isosceles triangle gives rise to a periodic trajectory on a right triangle obtained by identifying the halves of the original triangle. We examine the relationship between periodic trajectories on isosceles…
The problem of two interacting particles moving in a d-dimensional billiard is considered here. A suitable coordinate transformation leads to the problem of a particle in an unconventional hyperbilliard. A dynamical map can be readily…
The billiard problem concerns a point particle moving freely in a region of the horizontal plane bounded by a closed curve $\Gamma$, and reflected at each impact with $\Gamma$. The region is called a `billiard', and the reflections are…
In this paper the problem of estimating the number of periodical billiard trajectories is considered. The main result is the theorem on Morse theory for periodical billiard trajectories.
A polygon is called rational if the angle between each pair of sides is a rational multiple of $\pi.$ The main theorem we will prove is Theorem 1: For rational polygons, periodic points of the billiard flow are dense in the phase space of…
We present a dynamical analysis of a classical billiard chain -- a channel with parallel semi-circular walls, which can serve as a model for a bended optical fiber. An interesting feature of this model is the fact that the phase space…
In a set of experiments, Couder et. al. demonstrate that an oscillating fluid bed may propagate a bouncing droplet through the guidance of the surface waves. We present a dynamical systems model, in the form of an iterative map, for a…
Quantum particles interacting with potential barriers are ubiquitous in physics, and the question of how much time they spend inside classically forbidden regions has attracted interest for many decades. Recent developments of new…
A widely used mathematical model for the bouncing motion of an ideally elastic ball -- referred to in previous work by the first two authors and collaborators as a {\em no-slip billiard} system -- exhibits some notable dynamical behavior…
In this paper we investigate the existence of closed billiard trajectories in not necessarily smooth convex bodies. In particular, we show that if a body $K\subset \mathbb{R}^d$ has the property that the tangent cone of every non-smooth…
This paper explores two instances where dissipation plays a crucial role in curbing the unbounded energy growth of particles in time-dependent billiards. The first example involves an elliptical-like billiard with inelastic collisions…
Rigid bodies collision maps in dimension two, under a natural set of physical requirements, can be classified into two types: the standard specular reflection map and a second which we call, after Broomhead and Gutkin, no-slip. This leads…
We discuss a recent result by C. Culter: every polygonal outer billiard has a periodic trajectory.